Saturday, November 06, 2004

[W]hen the president gives the order to finish the job in Fallujah, the Washington civilians need to get out of the way of our Marines and soldiers. Send the lawyers on a Caribbean cruise. Our troops know how to do this job.

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We need to demonstrate that the United States military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price.

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That means killing....We don't need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses.

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Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.

Yep, only one result. And if you have to rack your brains to remember exactly what it was that the Iraqis did in order to "take on America," you're missing the essential point, which is that Freedom is on the march!

Benjamin Constant, way back in 1815, described in great and unerring detail the "sophism and imposture" by means of which a government will justify attacking other nations pre-emptively:

If the unhappy objects of its calumnies were easily subjugated, it would then pride itself on having pre-empted them. If they had the time and strength to resist it, it would cry: "You see, they did want war, since they are defending themselves!"

One should not think that such conduct is the accidental result of a particular perversity. It is, on the contrary, the necessary outcome of this position. Any authority that wished today to undertake extensive conquests would be condemned to this series of vain pretexts and scandalous lies.

The quotes above are from Constant's remarkable book The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization, which, despite its age, is the best refutation of neoconservatism I've ever read.

As for Ralph Peters, he should be sent to Fallujah, to replace any number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. There'd be far more justice in it.

4 comments:

This is what makes me scared, though maybe this is not the time to admit it. But the evidence is all there in the public sphere, yet people refuse it. It's ok to attack some foreign country to avenge something someone else did. This seems to be the moral choice. Yes, I'm bitter, but I don't see what else one could do right now.

Oh for chrissakes. Like we haven't read and heard all this garbage before... by the Tits of the Living Jesus, never mind the history of western imperialism, they said all this same shit WHEN WE INVADED FALLUJAH IN FUCKING APRIL.

History is tragedy in the first draft, farce in the second, and a for-shit sitcom pilot in the third...